At the red light I jumped out of the car into the cold December
night. We had been fighting these last few weeks.
Quibbling was really the right word. Putting our fingers
on the small pulses of our life together and offering polite
critiques like rabid political pundits during the presidential
season.

This evening Michael was pointing out the negative ways I
continued to frame the disappointments of my life. He
wanted desperately to have a glass half full but I was still
half empty.

I will not paint a smile on my face where one
does not exist, I told him angrily as I slammed the car
door.

It was just turning cold enough to see your own breath and
he watched as small puffs of white air trailed behind me like
the trail of breadcrumbs Hansel left for the woodcutter. But
he decided not to follow me. I turned right at the intersection
and he turned left.

I watched him drive away then stood still for a moment in
my thin leather jacket looking up at the tops of tall sugar maples
backlit by the streetlights.

What am I doing here? I wondered. We had been
so warm and affectionate that morning and now I was standing
alone in the cold in the middle of an unknown town. It was truly
like a Star Trek episode where Spock and Bones
and the Captain are beamed down to some distant planet that is
completely alien to them. All of my physical readings
looked normal: I could breathe the air, stand on solid
ground, place one foot in front of the other and walk all the
way to Timbuktu if I wanted to. But inside my emotional compass
had lost all of its bearings. I was no longer capable
of steering my life or his on an even keel. Now here I was unsure
of whether our marriage would make it through to the morning.
Over the last few years our love had been shredded like a letter.
What we were now experiencing was the confetti of our love; the
little bits and pieces that comprise the whole, the little bits
that are so disjointed you cant really tell where we fit
together anymore. In the middle of that intersection I realized
I could head north, south, east or west. One path could lead
to motherhood. One path could lead to divorce. One path could
lead to a life of asceticism, like the gaunt and bony holy homeless
of India. Which path would I take?

It took me a few moments to decide but I chose the route he
had taken, hoping in my very dramatic way that he would come
looking for me so I would not turn into a frozen martyr. After
five minutes Michael phoned me and I pretended not to hear. His
natural inclination was to make peace, to easily admit his role
in a battle. I hated his inbred diplomacy. It never
allowed for enough stewing or cold shoulder treatment. He
couldnt bear that kind of thing, and neither could I except
that sometimes the anger of a human soul is just what you need
to carve out a new space in your own heart, or in the heart of
a relationship that has been dragged through the mud. I would
apologize but just not yet. Right now this fire needed to burn.

* * *

We had searched for our Holy Grail for six years and had come
up empty handed. We had spent most of our savings
and all of our emotional reserves trying to become pregnant through
the grace of God and science. Neither approach had
worked. Now when he looks at his reflection in the mirror he
admits, as he first did after his father died, that he is a genetic
dead end. It stops right here, he told me one night
as his throat closed up in grief. When we die it will really
be the end of the line. I had just stood in
the bathroom doorway watching him. It was impossible
to say something like, Well, look on the bright side. At
least we still have each other because by that point it
was not clear that we did. It was not clear that the love that
had once been so palpable to us and the rest of the world was
strong enough to survive this gauntlet.

I had spent most of the past winter in bed with a hat pulled
down over my eyes to keep the glare of the white landscape to
a minimum. We were living in the country then and the open fields
and mountains were truly beautiful against the gray skies and
purple clouds. But day in and day out the barren terrain overwhelmed
me. Winter was the gestation period for spring, the season for
hunkering down. I had spent five years hunkering in a state of
focused family planning and it had not paid off. I
was tired. My womb was empty.

All through January and February he worried about me and I
assured him that my bronchitis was the real reason I couldnt
go outside and frolic in the snow. Every morning he invited me
to get out of bed and go with him to the café for coffee.
Every morning I gently refused. Please just leave me alone,
I prayed silently as I watched him harness all his confetti love
with the hope of resurrecting my shriveled spirit. Doesnt
he realize that because of me hell never be a father?

Everyone said it wasnt my fault, of course, and I knew
that on some level. But I was the one who lacked the courage
and the faith to believe that I would not relive the abuses of
my past or perpetrate them against an innocent. By the time I
manifested my own compassionate heart the overpaid doctors told
us it might be too late. It was an expensive game of Russian
roulette we played with the fertility clinic. We had gambled
all our faith and money on them because in America we thought
that if Mother Nature cant make you pregnant the drug companies
and the doctors certainly could. PEOPLE magazine and articles
in the Sunday New York Times reinforced that
message weekly and we swallowed it, hook, line and sinker. We
bowed down to science as though it were a God.

One time out of six we did get pregnant. One time we experienced
the euphoria of impending parenthood, that sense of wonder about
the miracle of life. Seven weeks later that life disintegrated
and the depths of despair began to strangle us. It had never
dawned on us that our high-tech pregnancy would not last. We
had not, until then, understood the difference between the meanings
of lives births and pregnancies in the
fertility literature. We learned the hard way that pregnancies
were a dime-a-dozen in the fertility business. Lives
births were not.

Neither were fertile egg donors. We had chosen two egg donors
to work with. One was a lovely blonde-haired girl of 21 who wore
a cowgirl hat and looked like Annie Oakley. A month before the
procedure a cruel, dull witted clinic nurse told us in a monotone
voice that tests had revealed she was infertile, too. Our
donor was infertile? How could they advertise and expect a $10K
payment for an infertile donor? Turns out there are
no laws regulating that industry either. It was a
crapshoot with the donors as much as it was with my own eggs. Our
second donor came highly recommended until the day the doctor
called and told us that of the dozen eggs they had retrieved,
none had fertilized in the Petri dish.

We wouldnt recommend using this donor again,
he told us. There is obviously something wrong
with her. She should have produced at least two or three-dozen
eggs given the potent drugs she took. Im very sorry.

There was silence on the other end of the phone as we realized
that this $50K gamble had really been a house of cards. It had
never dawned on us that the donors would not be screened by the
agency or the clinic prior to the emotional and dollar price
being paid.

* * *

I was beginning to get cold. My t-shirt and thin sweater did
nothing to keep the night air from climbing up beneath the waistband
of my coat, floating along my belly like the cold fingertips
of a lover. Not wanting to risk hypothermia I finally
called Michael on my cell.

Where are you? he asked in his I-love-you-why-are-we-fighting-again-voice.

Im on the road you speeded down after I got out
of the car.

Oh, God. Im miles away. I turned around right
away and drove in the direction I thought you went.

Well, when you didnt pull over I decided I should
follow you. Doesnt that make sense?

Nothing makes sense, he said. Ill
be there in a minute.

I clicked my phone off feeling badly that I hadnt the
wherewithal to apologize right then and there. I was still angry
that while our world and our bliss continued to erode Michael
was still able to muster a calmness that I could not. I
was prickly and mad and couldnt keep it inside. He was
sad and lonely and couldnt let it out. And so we clashed.
He tried to keep my pain at bay by asking me not to talk about
it quite so boldly. I reacted to his censorship as
though it was the Politburo clamping down on my right to free
speech.

I was tired of feeling pressured to bounce back to the way
life was before fertility treatments because never in my life
did I feel so unable to bounce back. I was like a tennis ball
that had lost its air. Once I hit the ground I just sat there
like a fat sphere of felt. It isnt so much the absence
of a child that hurts me. I know I will become a mother
through adoption and I know I will love that child. It
is the absence of my old optimism and faith that hurts me. I
now look at the world with a lens of skepticism that did not
exist before.

The phone rang again. I was shivering when I answered.

Where are you? he asked, almost in tears. I
cant find you. Ive driven up and down the street.

Im on the right side of the road, near a white
wooden church gleaming bright, bright white in the moonlight.

I couldnt move then, not just because Michael asked
me not to but because I realized how much I loved him, even though
there were days recently when I didnt recognize him. In
the process of becoming Fertility Refugees we had both shed skins
and donned new colors and our constant quibbling was the give
and take of our new learning curves with each other. I instinctively
know that we have reached a crucial point in our marriage: we
are standing at an evolutionary crossroad. There are so many
options and while I stood there waiting for him I couldnt
help but think about hiding in the bushes so that when he did
drive by he would not see. I could just disappear.
I could vanish in a flash and hitchhike out to New Mexico and
camp in the desert. I could join a commune and smoke pot everyday
and forget about miscarriages and the scars it leaves behind.

These are options that I know really arent options.
They are illusions. But what isnt an illusion? You
create your own reality. Wasnt that Michaels point
to begin with? Make your life good again, was what
he was trying to say to me when I decided to jump out of the
car. Its just that he said it with such frustrated
irritation I couldnt hear it. I heard that I wasnt
good enough; I heard that I wasnt trying. Didnt he
know that getting through the day with a half smile on my face
was hard enough at the moment? I wanted to be patted on the back
for my miniscule efforts to function, not reprimanded for not
having reached the summit in six hours. I was in that
tricky no-mans-land of wanting to be left alone and simultaneously
smothered with love. I needed Michaels enthusiasm for life
at the same time I tried to smear it, like an artist smearing
reds and yellows to make a sun. I needed his joy in
my veins. I needed the heat of his cheek on mine. I needed his
eyes so that I could see and understand his view of a world still
filled with optimism and goodness.

Finally I took out my phone and dialed his number.

Where are you now? I asked. My voice had softened.

I see the church steeple, Michael said. Im
almost there.

Im sorry, I said.

I know. Me too.

I love you.

I see you.

Miriam Zoll is an award-winning
writer, and a researcher, teacher and public speaker with more
than 20 years experience in the public policy and international
development arena. She has worked with such global institutions
as the United Nations, the Earth Institute at Columbia University,
the Coalition on Children Affected by AIDS, Planned Parenthood,
Gay Mens Health Crisis, Harvard University and the International
Womens Health Coalition. A certified yoga instructor, Miriam
is the founding co-producer of the Ms. Foundation for Womens
annual Take Our Daughters to Work Day. She is a member of the
board of the Boston Women's Health Book Collective-Our Bodies
Ourselves and the UNDP-Japan Partnership sponsored Hauirou Commission.
The author of dozens of articles and publications, her work has
been published by The Royal Tropical Institute, Columbia University,
the United Nations, The Christian Science Monitor, The Boston
Globe and the American News Service, among other venues.
In 2005 she was awarded a Research Fellowship at the Center for
International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT). Focusing on HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, her research
addressed how government and donor compensation to unpaid health
care sector workerseither through salaries or direct
cash transferscan reduce poverty and HIV infection
while improving standards of care and support to millions children
and people living with HIV/AIDS.